Well, okay, so here we are at the Wednesday Morning Podcast. It's early in the morning. Welcome to a new day. So Jason, what's top of mind here on a Wednesday morning? So I think our topic for this morning is the importance of reforming the church in an ongoing way. Again, I'm Jason Dome. I'm one of the elders at Hope Baptist Church. I've been a husband for 17 years, a father for 14 years. Now there are six children in the home. So anyway, this is exciting to have the opportunity to do this because this subject is right in our wheelhouse. The types of things that we love to talk about because I think, I'll probably speak for all of us, we've been blessed by the concept of continual reformation. We need it as individual men, not just as church leaders. Right, so we've got four elders here. Scott Brown, I'm one of them, and we've also got Steve Brady. Steve, what do you have to say here? This topic that we're going to talk about this morning, Reformation of the Church and really the sufficiency of scripture, as Jason said, this is right up our alley because our desire is to bring scripture to bear on everything we do. And so this message is foundational because everything we talk about after this needs to be looked at in the light of that doctrine. Is scripture sufficient for the things that we're talking about? If it's not, then we shut it. So we also have Dan Horn here, another elder at Hope Baptist Church. So Dan, here so early in the morning, what's top of mind for you on the subject of church reformation? One thing that strikes me this morning is just that as we reform, we're also thinking of new ways to communicate. And so it's exciting that we have an opportunity to try to converse about these things in a way that can get people to think the thoughts that we have thought and that God has led us to think. And so they can reform their own lives because in the end that's the goal is for us to be conformed to the image of Christ. Yeah, and that's really our hope for our church. If you go to our website, if you look at the pillars of ministry that we really want to be realities in our church, here they are. The centrality, the gospel, that the gospel of Christ is the primary thrust of our message. And what is the gospel of Christ? Well, the gospel of Christ isn't just the message of salvation. It includes that. All things I have commanded you, as Jesus said in the Great Commission. We want our church to be characterized not just by the centrality of the Gospel, but by the preaching of the Word of God. And for us it's the expository preaching of the Word of God. That we want our church to be characterized by prayer, so we gather our people together for prayer. That we want to fulfill the command that the church would sing together, so that our worship would be authentic, it would be beautiful, it would be worship in spirit and in truth. That we would have a church community life that is consistent with what we see in Scripture. That we are breaking bread from house to house. We're practicing hospitality. That we have a relational church life that we see reflected in the New Testament. That we practice church discipline. That we practice personal evangelism. That we plant churches. We see this practice in the New Testament. So, that's the kind of church life that we really want to have. regulated by Scripture. And so whenever you bring up the subject of church life, for us, we want to immediately start talking about how do you regulate church life? What should church life look like? And that's what this podcast is all about. How do we engage in the beautification of the body of Christ through her Reformation? Well, Scripture is the first and the last place in the discussion. So that's what this whole podcast is about, is about reforming church life. We're in a day and age where the church is not fulfilling its role, both as salt and light to the society around it. and the blessing that it should be to the people who are in the pews. With where the church has gone, it ends up being a very ineffectual church, and part of that is that some years ago in the United States, we lost the foundation of Scripture, the foundation for all practices in the church. When you lose 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17, what you end up doing is doing things that have no power, because the power is through obedience to God, that God blesses us. And so one of the things that we need to get back to, and one of the things that we should take great hope and joy in, is that there was a significant movement 20, 30 years ago back to the belief that Scripture is sufficient for all things. But that's not enough either. It's fine to profess that belief, but we need to do more than profess that belief. We need to put those beliefs into practice. And we need to start saying, what therefore does it mean? What shall we now do? When we talk in terms of Reformation, I think probably the four of us agree that it's not primarily doctrinal. We're not putting forth a new novel doctrine. We're really, in many ways, returning to older doctrines. We're very consistent with other churches and their reformed traditions. essentially a doctrinal reformation. It's a reformation of practice where we're hoping that the practice of the church, that at least in creed espouses the sufficiency of scripture, has our practices catching up with that. So we say we believe the Bible. We say that We want Christ to be the head of the church, but for Christ to really be the head of the church, we have to be doing the things that he said to do. And so, as God would give us more light and we understand more of what the Bible teaches, our practice has to catch up. This is what this is about. I think one of the points that Jason makes there is what the church ends up doing in practice is believing in the theory of evolution, even though they reject it in thought. And what I mean by that is that we don't look and say, what has the church done over the last two thousand years? Instead, we have a tendency to look and say, what has the church done over the last twenty years? The church has always been the bride of Christ. We should look back and say, how was God leading before? And it's so easy for us just to look towards recent history and say, well, Sunday schools, that's normal. Well, no, it's been around for seven or eight percent of the time since the church was established through the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. And for us to to just look forward and not look back over that history of the church is basically to believe in the theory of evolution. The church is evolving to this new point. No, we should be faithful to what God has given us from the beginning. Right. So, I mean, what that means in our own thinking about the church. is that we want to try to be very deliberate about the things that Scripture has said clearly about how church life should be conducted. So we want to take things that are explicitly communicated in Scripture or patterned there and say these are the things that we ought to do. For example, it's not for us to reinvent the church in every generation for that generation. But it is for us to go back to Scripture and find out what's there, and pattern after that, to be conformed to what's there. So, probably the most important question that we ask, and we ask this about everything, and that is, can this practice be clearly seen in Scripture? And if not, We don't want to do it, but if it is, we want to do it. Even if it's a practice that might seem strange to people. For example, why do we sing? We sing because the Bible says that the body of Christ should sing together. Why do we preach the word? We do that because the Bible commands us to preach the word. Why do we take communion? Why do we baptize? Why do we do church discipline? We do those things for one reason. These are the things that God has prescribed for the church to do. So we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. We're not trying to put together a cooler wheel. What we really want to do is find out what is pleasing unto the Lord. Just to pile on to what Scott is saying here, the last exhortation that Paul gives to Timothy at the end of 1 Timothy are these words, O Timothy, guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions. of what is falsely called knowledge. By professing it, some have strayed concerning the faith." And so, we really view ourselves in this role as guarding a deposit that's been passed down to us in the Word of God. And so, in that sense, we're not innovators at all. Family integration in churches is not a new innovation. It might seem like that because not many churches are doing it now, but it's a return. It's a return to the deposit that was given to us, you know, discipleship. Family discipleship as a foundation block for the local church has been an important part of church history all along. And it's so clearly laid out in the deposit that we've been given in the Word of God that a return to it is completely appropriate. And just to unpack that, family integration in our discipleship practice is just one thing among many. In many ways, it's kind of a transparent thing. But why do we integrate families together and the ages together for discipleship? Well, it's really simple. You don't see any examples of age-segregated discipleship in the Bible. There are no commands for it. But what you do find are gatherings for celebration, for worship, that are age-integrated. God seems to gather the older with the younger. He puts the older man with the younger man. He doesn't put the younger man with the younger man. or the younger woman with the younger woman. So why do we age-integrate our discipleship in our church? Because that's the only thing we see in Scripture. And we want to say, well, let's be satisfied with that. Let's don't create our own new paradigm that seems better. God has given us the paradigm in Scripture. I know for me, and this has already been brought up, but just another way to think about it, the way I've I've often thought about this, and the way I think about it now, is to ask myself the question, by what standard? By what standard do we measure if something is right? By what standard do we measure if we should do something in the church? And that's what Scott and Jason and Dan have been going back to here. Everybody has a standard. It's wrong for someone to say, well, I don't really have a standard. Even the atheist has a standard. Everybody has a standard by which they measure something. Some people it's experience. Some people it's tradition. For many it's pragmatism. But as Christians and certainly as church leaders what should be our standard as an individual just as you live your life. What should be the standard? Well, it's the Word of God. That's the standard that we're to measure up to. And so that's the whole crux behind reforming, whether it be your individual life or the church. You look at the practices that you're currently involved in and you measure them against Scripture. And if there's a disconnect, well, then the answer is to get rid of them and to go strictly with what Scripture says. I mentioned tradition. I think of Matthew 15. And I'll read the first couple of verses, a very familiar passage, where it says, Then the scribes and the Pharisees who were from Jerusalem came to Jesus, saying, Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread. And Jesus, he answered and said to them, Why do you also transgress the commandment of God because of your tradition? So we see here that men have a propensity to supplant the Word of God with their own traditions, and we're making a bold call against that. We're making a bold call to look towards Scripture and to conform the life of the church, the life of the individual, to Scripture. I think when we look at hope and look at somebody coming to hope for the first time, what they would see that would probably strike them as the most different are probably three things, in my opinion. One is the additional teaching time, right? The scripture says that women stay silent in church, they should ask their husbands at home. Implied in that is that men should be rising up and speaking in the church. And so we have, after the sermon, a time where people can come and discuss the sermon and ask questions about the sermon. So that's very different, but we're pointing back to scripture is why we do that another would we have weekly a fellowship meal Why do we have a fellowship meal well in scripture the Lord's Supper? Was part of the agape meal it was part of sitting down and breaking bread together in that fellowship similarly why do we practice the Lord's Supper every week the reason we practice the Lord's Supper is they gather weekly and for the breaking of bread, which is probably the Lord's Supper in the New Testament. So when you look at the pattern, we're not doing these things that we came up with. Even though somebody might walk into our church and see something that's very different than what they've experienced, we're not coming up with new things. We're trying to return back to the old patterns of Scripture. Dan, just to comment on that, all of those things that you just mentioned are things that have changed for us and become practices for us. They haven't always been practices for us. And the point of that is to say that we understand that we're not immune from always reforming. We don't hold ourselves out. out there as those who have reforms to the right level and now we're instructing the rest of the Christian world. We understand that there are things that God has given us to say in the Christian community and we think it's important, but we also know that we're subject to that as well. Our practices are subject to the light of Scripture, to the scrutiny of Scripture as well. And I would imagine there will be other things that are not necessarily on our radar now, that are top of mind for us now, but that God will give us light and we'll have to reform our practices going forward as well. The reality is that God is sovereign over the reforming of His church. Churches are reformed in different ways. They're reformed at different speeds. And there are reformations that happen in churches that are examples to all the other churches as well. So, we certainly don't think this is the only reformation that's necessary in the church. But what is important is that we're all asking the same question. And that is, what does the Scripture say? And then to humble ourselves and say, we trust that, rather than trying to think of something that will draw bigger crowds or do something that we might like to do. The big question is, let's, with all of our hearts, be faithful to what is explicit in Scripture. And that's really the heart of our elders in our church here, is to try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. And underneath everything we're talking about here is just the principle of hermeneutics. How do you go about interpreting scripture? Historically, when it comes to discussing worship, how are we to worship God in church? You see two terms. You see the regulative principle of worship and you see the normative principle. The normative principle would say that if it's not explicitly forbidden in scripture, that it's okay for the church to go ahead and conduct, it's okay for the church to adopt that particular practice. In fact, I believe Luther probably held to that particular principle. Then you have the regulative principle of worship, which you certainly see Calvin holding to. And that's quite a bit different. That says unless a practice is specifically delineated in scripture, that we're forbidden to do that. We're forbidden to come up with our own neat and creative ways in order to worship God. God has given us his word, his revealed word in scripture, and he tells us exactly how He wants us to worship Him. And so we're not to come up with anything creative. We are regulated. What we do in the church is regulated by Scripture. And underneath that, like I said, are hermeneutical principles. So there's a reluctance to add or subtract from Scripture. Deuteronomy 4, 2 makes that very clear. In the last chapter of the Bible, there's this warning against adding and subtracting to the Word of God. So there should be fear in our hearts to innovate things beyond what God has revealed. And so we want to have that fear. So if someone comes to the church and they have a new interesting idea, we want to ask, does this fulfill specific commands of Scripture? Does this fit? Is it pictured? Is it commanded? Does it seem to be faithful with what Scripture has communicated? So that's the first question we're always going to ask. We're not going to ask, what's your passion? We're going to ask, what has the Lord said? That's the wrong way to look at things. We need to start by accepting the sovereignty of God. And since God is sovereign, he has the right to tell us what to do. And we have the responsibility to obey it and to walk in faith and not walk by saying, this looks wise, so let's go do it. No, let's just trust that God has revealed to us what he desires us to do. and our responsibility is to do it. So how does that work out? It works out like this. We want the families and the individuals that come to our church to trust in the simple practices of Scripture. We want them to say, God has prescribed that this is how I might be taught, how I might be sanctified, how I might be comforted in this world, how I might be equipped for the work of the ministry. I want to bring myself under the preaching of the Word of God. I'm going to bring myself to gather with the body for prayer. I'm going to gather with the body for communion. I'm going to gather for worship, for singing, for instruction. I'm going to order my life around the things that God has established. So, we want everybody in the whole church to come to the prayer meeting. We want everybody in the church to come to the times of preaching and equipping that we establish. Why? Because these are the things that God has prescribed that the church should do. One of the problems in the modern heart, or probably any heart, is that the heart wants to do what it wants to do. I like the preaching, but I don't like the prayer, so I'm not going to prayer meeting. Well, what we would say is, no. Scripture has established that this is a critical type of gathering for the church. Bring yourself, bring your family to that prayer meeting. Don't miss that. God has given you a way of sanctification. He's provided these things for your health. Don't go do your own thing. You know, don't say, you know, I have something more important to do tonight. Find yourself gathering to do the things that God has prescribed. And Scott, as you mentioned, some of these practices that we see in the church now, the preaching of the sermon, the communion, actually the singing, congregational singing, and then even the life outside the church where people are working. We can be thankful for these things. We can be thankful if we look back to the Reformation. The 1600s, even before, I mean, John Hus was preaching the same things that Luther was preaching. That was 100 years prior to the things that Luther was preaching. But the reason why we see these things is because of the Reformation in the 1600s. There wasn't congregational singing. Luther brought congregational singing back. The preaching of the sermon was lost for hundreds and hundreds of years. And then we saw that come back to life with the Reformation. And people in that time, they died for these things. These were practices in the church that Luther and Calvin, Zwingli, even go back, like I said, to John Huss, they saw these practices. in Scripture. And then they saw that these practices did not show up in the church. And they desired it was worth their life to fight to bring these practices back to the church. So many of the things that we enjoy today, sometimes we forget that they weren't always there. But because of the Reformation, that we saw in the 1600s, even before that, we see these now. And so, they were addressing the issues of the day, which is what we're doing. We're addressing the issues of the day. And a hundred, two hundred years from now, there are things that, as Jason was saying, we don't see. Things that we need to reform that we don't see that may be addressed hundreds of years from now. So one of the things I think should be said about Reformation is how consistent the whole concept of Reformation is with the teaching of the New Testament. Repentance was at the core of John the Baptist's message, of Jesus's message, of Paul's, of Peter's. Repentance is at the core of the gospel. One of the things we learned from the letters to the churches in Revelation is that repentance is not a one-time event where we repent, we're saved, and then we're done with repentance. Repentance is ongoing for a couple of reasons. One is We really are born as newborn babies. We don't understand yet. And God gives us light over time. And as we get new light from God, as we understand things better, then we're required to not just be hearers of the Word, but doers. The other thing is, there's a propensity in the human heart to drift. And we see this is true of churches as well. There are letters to churches calling for repentance. They were real churches. They were true churches. And yet, they had drifted. Always reforming is maybe not articulated that way in the New Testament, but the core of it, which is repentance, is the theme of the New Testament. And since we all start out fallen, that the Reformation, if it's just in the church without affecting the family and without affecting the individual, the church, one of the things that happens is if the church is disobeying scripture, but they're preaching scripture to their members, How can they expect their members to obey Scripture? And so, part of it is that as we reform the church, we're also putting a witness before the members that they need to be reforming their own lives, because that's what Scripture should do. It should reform them into the image of Christ. And as they read Scripture, as they pray, as the Holy Spirit works on them, as they're convicted of sins, all these things are to turn them back to being the things that they should be. And if the church isn't doing that, then they're failing in their witness to their own numbers and they're failing to be what they should be. Yeah. And we're going to assume a couple of things about ourselves and about the people who come to our church. We're going to assume that we all are in need of reformation. We're going to assume that we all have fuzzy ideas about what church life and family life and community life. should be like. And so we're expecting that we're going to have people in a lot of different places in their own journey with the Lord. Some will be clearer and fuzzier about biblical ecclesiology. And the most important thing, though, is that they understand that there is one single standard that we are all looking to. And that we all have to just continue to learn what Scripture is telling us to do in the church. This is the beauty of the body of Christ. We all come in at a certain place and all are in need of reformation and that comes through repentance via knowledge. One of the big issues for all of us is the speed at which our practice catches up with our doctrine. One of the things that's exciting that's happening in America now is the way that if you look Twenty, thirty years ago there was a great revival towards looking at Scripture and saying it's sufficient and it's infallible. And then you go another ten years later and you see a revival of the doctrines of grace. And then you go another ten years later and you see a revival in the church. As doctrine comes up and as we understand doctrine better, it has to affect practice. If it doesn't affect practice, it's worthless. And so as we see the revival moving forward, and even if you go back to the original Reformation, or what we call the Reformation, you see the same thing. There's an understanding of the doctrines of grace and it starts to play itself out. And it takes 200 years to really think through how it applies in certain places and how that means you should then live in certain ways. And so we're seeing the same thing now. So it's a very exciting time and it's a very hopeful time. But at the same time, it can be a trying time because we're in disagreement with a lot of the body of Christ. Just some thoughts as I think about this from an individual level within the church. As an elder, I see that this is often a challenge because we should not expect to see all the members' practices catching up with the doctrine at the same pace. So, like you said, Scott, people come into the church at different levels. Well, people go through the process of sanctification at different levels. So, as a church leader, as an elder, I have to keep that in mind, that as I look at one person who seems to be a little further along, not to compare someone else who's a little behind with that person. the rate at which an individual's practice catches up with their doctrine is going to change. But we should expect to see movement, certainly, and that's what we're looking for. We're expecting to see movement toward the direction of holiness. And someone's progress should never be a source of pride. We are so far underweight spiritually. We are so far from holiness. We are so far from the holiness of God that if any level of progress causes any kind of pride or looking down the nose, we have sin running rampant in our own hearts. So we have to be careful with that as well. God is sovereign to reform his church and his people. And there's nothing that a man has that hasn't been given him from heaven. So we have to recognize that, that God is bringing his own people along at his own pace. We need to recognize that as a church level as well. It's always frightening when we do conferences and we talk about these things because you don't know who's going to walk out and go back and basically try to blow up their church because they're going to say, you should be doing this, you should be doing that, you should be doing this. But in no way are we saying that because God has not revealed those things to that church at that time, sanctified that local body at that time, does that mean it's not a local body of the Lord Jesus Christ or that it's holier than we are or that we're holier than it is? I mean, we're convicted of things through Scripture. We're trying to reform things in our own body as God reveals them and gives us light, but in no way does that make us somehow better or more sanctified than other people. It means that there's areas that God has conformed us closer to what he desires us to be, but to take pride in that is to reject the sovereignty of God. When I think about Reformation, I tend to think about bold rejections of the scripture. But the things that need to be reformed often don't fit in that category at all. I've been reading through the Bible with my two oldest daughters, and as we're in the law in Exodus and Leviticus, there's all this about unintended sin. And I think a lot of that is what is addressing today. People, they were born, they started going to a church, and that's what they know. And God is giving the church more light. This is really an exciting time to be in the church, and I can probably be said in any age, but it's definitely true of this one. God is giving the church more light, and we are seeing doctrine-reformed people embracing the sufficiency of Scripture, and slowly but surely, their practice is catching up. But definitely there are blind spots that are being revealed. It makes me wonder what blind spots will be revealed in the time to come that we're totally insensitive to now. And part of it is that, as Americans, we're very thoughtless people. We just kind of walk through our lives, and Scripture instead commands us to be very deliberate and to take every thought captive. That's not what our society trains us to do, especially public schools. They train just the opposite. You just do whatever the government wants you to do. There's a significant element of that in the public schools, and even if you read the founding of the public schools, you see that being a deliberate element. When you look at it now, we have people coming from that environment, and Scripture's commanding us to do the opposite. It's commanding us to renew our minds. It's commanding us to be deliberate, to take every thought captive. And so as we do that, it's an exciting time to see what thoughts have we not taken captive at this point in time. Well, and it's astonishing to think of how many areas God has not revealed to us. Think about all the areas that he's revealed to you since you were saved how unclear you were on the day of your salvation but yet God picked you up or you were and then began to nourish you and cherish you and wash you one week at a time. I think about all the sermons I heard from the time when I was in my teens. And if my acceptability to God was based on my knowledge at age 18 or 16 or 15, I would be in real trouble. I think one of the areas that we've seen some progress in as far as reforming of the church is the expository sermon. I think you see more and more now churches preaching expository. What I mean by that is maybe going through a book sequentially starting from chapter one to the end of the book. But what I really mean by expositional preaching is to take a passage of scripture open it up and unfold the truths of what's in that scripture. And this is big in many ways because for the longest time I've always thought the purpose of the church was to bring in as many unbelievers as possible so that they could hear an evangelistic sermon and they might be saved. Now we definitely want to see people saved and we desire that. We desire unbelievers to come to church and be saved but If I look at Ephesians 4, 11 through 16, just on the whole idea of the purpose of the church, and this does go back to reforming, how do we think about the church? What is the purpose of the church? Is it for every sermon to be an evangelistic sermon where you get the milk of the word, just the very basics of the word? which is important, but here's what Ephesians 4, 11-16 says, And he himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the trickery of men and the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the Head, Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effect of working, by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love." And so, that's what the Expository Sermon does. It will be evangelistic because it's the Word of God, but the Expository Sermon unfolds the deeper truths of Scripture so that people have a doctrine to ground their feet on. They ground their feet on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. which you should get in an expository sermon. So it builds up the saints, it edifies the saints, so it equips them to go out into their community, into their workforce, into their neighborhood, and share the gospel, to share the truths that they were taught in that sermon. And continuing in Ephesians 5, right, it talks about how Christ purifies His church through the Word. And so that Word But the doctrine is the basis by which then the cleansing happens. And so, in a continual basis, right, it's not that, oh, you hear the doctrine once and therefore you're going to obey it perfectly. It's more that God is infinite. And so, through the sermon and through a growth in the body of their understanding, it gives, as Isaiah said, precept by precept, block by block, brick by brick. I mean, that is God's plan for how the church is purified.